by Glenn Daly

The wind shrieks all around me, dirt and dust swirl about my face - five straps, one latch and one flimsy plexiglass canopy are all that keep me and my 185 lb. carcass from free-falling 3000 feet to the boulders below. Sure, there's a parachute. Yeah, I understood the instructions. Still, I wondered: 'If the latch broke and the plexiglass failed to hold, would I have the composure to pull the cord?'

So ... when you're hanging inverted 3000 feet above Warner Springs, what do you say to your 18 year old pilot? "Be careful?" 'If you'd been careful, you wouldn't be upside down, now, would you?' says my still active, lapsed-Catholic conscience.

No excuses, it was my choice. I had come to Warner Springs to write about sailplanes, and, while doing the research, Dante Roccatani's name snapped to attention.

"Dante Roccatani?" I said, "This kid's gonna be a star. He'll fly space shuttles or interplanetary transports."

Not only does Dante Roccatani fly, he'd gotten his license when he was sixteen and is now a commercial glider pilot. And he was thrilled to talk about his flying experience, wanting, in his youthful exuberance, to demonstrate all he knows.

"Want to do some acro?" he said. "Acro?" "Yeah, you know, loops, rolls, hammerheads ... acro." - Dante-speak for aerobatics.

"Sure," I said, my ears not believing the noise my mouth had just emitted. It was a testosterone challenge: a kid barely glimmering in Daddy's eyes when I'd earned my license, wanted to know if I had the right stuff.

'Sure?' screamed my conscience. 'Is this one of those mid-life crises the women's magazines warn about?'

You see, I have always been a conservative pilot, who never met a risk he liked - and I liked them even less after I flew into the edge of that nighttime thunderstorm south of ABE, a thousand years ago.

'Acro? What am I, nuts?'

Enter 18 year old Dante Roccatani, 5'9", 140 lbs. soaking, a trio of earrings in his left lobe, strutting like a rooster eyeballing the pullets. He does the pre-flight prep, the FAA mandated parachute briefing, then the warning about the straps that run between one's legs:

"Make sure they fit properly or they might be calling you Squeaky." Then ... .

"... you see the mountain off to our left ... ?" says Dante.
A crystalline azure sky envelops us, the granite boulders on Hot Springs Mountain outlined in brilliant, haute relief. I nod acknowledgement, slackjawed at the panorama of backcountry California beauty from 7500'.

"You're familiar with lee wave?" he asks. I nod again.

"What the air does is ... it comes up over the mountain and goes back down, and then it goes up and down, up and down - just like a wave - all the way through the valley ... and, right now, look at our variometer, we're in the up part - we're going up pretty good."

"FOUR HUNDRED FEET PER MINUTE, THAT'S GOOD?" I say, loud, over the constant rushing air, trying to find a manly voice.

"Yeah, that's very good. And it's nice and smooth. That's one of the characteristics of wave. You get from down low, which is really bumpy, then up into the wave, where it's lifting, and it just turns glass smooth, just like that. But, with wave, with the glassy smooth lift, comes the worst turbulence you'll ever have in your life ... it's called rotor?

"OH?" I felt my stomach churn.

"Right underneath where we are right now, right under the crest of the wave, there are little pockets of air that twirl around in the descending air, and if you get into those, it'll make you puke in a second."

"Glurp," I said. It's a sound I make when my stomach stops churning and leaps into my mouth.

"Glurp," I said again, a g-force glurp, as we climbed out of the 140 knot dive we had entered. 140 knots is the speed you need in order to complete a loop. Y'all know what a loop is, right? That's where your alimentary canal reverses, and your epiglottis and teeth are all that keep your esophagus, stomach and intestines from escaping into the ether.

There came another 'glurp' -- a disorientation 'glurp' -- evoked by the transposition of earth and sky that came at the top of the loop. Look down to look up - only looking down made me glurp louder and looking up ... well ... I couldn't do it after that first peek ... so I shut my eyes. Tight

"I love acro," Dante screams, then he defines his soaring success barometer: " ... It's when you have to go to the bathroom so badly, it hurts," he says, "That's when you know you've had a really good day of lift."

We came level again, smooth, dead on course, Dante laughing and grinning at me from the back of the cockpit. "Wasn't that great?" he says. Glurp.

Then we do a roll left - -180 degrees through the roll axis until I was hanging (as earlier described) inverted by the aforementioned five straps, one latch and one FLIMSY plexiglass canopy. We hung like that for most of January, it seemed -- dust up my nose, in my mouth - ptooey, ptew - while I clutched my tape recorder, pen and pad (I had been forewarned that occasionally, in rolls, without the centripetal force afforded by a loop, UFO's [unsecured flying objects] were known to orbit the cockpit, striking occupants with malice aforethought.)

Finally, out of the roll and feeling that I might again want to live if I could just get the heck out of the sailplane, the rushing wind again began howling, banshee-like as we dove at the earth to build up speed to do a 'cloverleaf' - a modified hammerhead stall, straight up, up, up ... up ... then straight back down through the tail, rolling out on a 90 degree turn from our original heading.

"Want to do some more?" said Dante, giggling, as we came level.

Glurp.

"Sailpig," I'd heard a couple of locals say, describing the Grob 103A. I thought, 'Were they crazy? It's sleek as a stiletto with long and tapered wings, sparkling white with red and blue stripes, looking like it would respond if you thought the word, 'bank'. Wrong.

At the controls I discovered that 'they' were right - a truck w/o power steering. Jam right rudder, then jerk right aileron and it might come around, eventually. A single place Grob is sleek as a stiletto and as responive as a Maseratti in a third dimension. The two place Grob is an after-thought, when the Grob people realized that they could make more sailplanes by building two-seaters, thereby enabling sailplane owners to sell more rides. Only the Grob people just hung another couple of feet onto the fuselage, failed to sufficiently modify wing, aileron or rudder, so that you need to jam rudder and jerk aileron in order to make the thing turn. A truck.

" ... I've got probably around twenty five or thirty flights of aerobatics," Dante says over the constant whistling rush of air over the canopy, the brilliant winter sun pouring through the plexiglass, warming me like a budding hothouse orchid.

" ... I did one once every month and by the time I got to ten, I took my safety ride with Bret ... I sat in the front and Bret sat in the back ... and he checked me out to do loops and rolls, and I've been practicing like crazy since.

"I've gotten about fifteen more flights since then, which is quite a bit of aerobatics time. And I love it - it's great." He says all that with a fascinating mixture of the confidence of accomplishment, filtered through an 18 year old's raging hormones and screaming insecurities.

"The 19th of January, '94 ... that was my first solo. I'd flown for about six months before then and I got a little bit of flight experience from my uncle in Cessnas ... he showed me what the controls do and why the airplane flies and how to operate the engine and all that stuff, so I entered soaring kind of knowing what I was doing. I kind of knew what I was doing, but I've learned quite a bit from these guys - they've got great instructors here. And the owners are great, too - they give all the employees discounts on the airplanes. Bret takes me up flying every now and then in his Cessna 180 - that's a really neat airplane. It towed one of the Grobs, like this one, up to Hemet to have some maintenance done on it and he let me sit right seat and let me fly most of the time."

"It's got some horses, too, doesn't it?," I say. He replies in a mounting crescendo of excitement.

" ... Oh, yeah, it's got 235, but it's got a adjustable pitch prop?, so you can flatten the pitch out and make it climb like ... you know ... like a thermal." He laughs at the memory. "It can really climb. Or you can flatten the pitch out and make it cruise really fast, so it acts like its got more horses than it really does."

The sound of wind over the canopy is a rushing constant, howling louder as we dive for speed, then quieter, whispering, as we await the stall break at 35 knots.

We flew for nearly an hour, and had it not been busy at the field, we could have flown longer than that - we'd maneuver and lose altitude, then find wave, and climb higher, practicing turns and stalls but no loops, no rolls ... NO BLOODY AEROBATICS!

Dante reclaimed the controls for the landing, then greased it, touching down exactly where he needed in order to have the sailpig stop abeam of its tie down. A work of art, it was. A hell of a pilot, is he - all 5'9", 140 lbs, 18 years of him.

Back on terra infirma, wobbly-kneed and green-gobbed, (but my waffle and bacon breakfast had miraculously remained down) I struggled from the cockpit and helped push the sailpig back onto it's tie-down rail. Sunday, and the sunny, warm and breathtakingly blue skies, had drawn them all out to take a look, take a flight, study Lake Henshaw and the mountains ringing the valley.

My chute still tightly and (carefully) cinched to me, I appeared to be a soaring veteran, back again from spitting in the face of Mother Nature. None of the groundlings knew that I'd clucked, pullet-like, when offered the opportunity for more aerobatics. I looked like an aerobatics pilot - I was an aerobatics pilot. Looky-loos stood in awe of me, as if I were a visiting potentate from another planet.

"How was it?" one of them asked, meekly, as if speaking to Lillienthal, himself.

"Das gut ... I mean ... did you want to know about the flight, itself ... or the aerobatics?" I said.

Awe dripping from every word, the looky-loo darn-near genuflected as he said, "You flew acro?" (Am I the only one who calls it aerobatics?)

"Yeah," I said, "I flew acro." And I walked away with my best John Wayne swagger. That's right, podnah, I flew acro. Glurp.

Most rides don't involve hanging inverted. Those that do require a special waiver to be signed by the passenger. You must be willing to receive and understand instruction in the use and care of your parachute, as FAA regulations demand for any aerobatics maneuvers. All pilots are FAA certified, commercial pilots, many of them are qualified to instruct, as well.

For more information contact:

Sky Sailing
31930 Highway 79
Warner Springs, CA 92086

(619) 782-0404

Fax 782-9251

copyright 1996 Stephen Glenn Daly - All Rights Reserved